I went to your link and found: "A more scientific conclusion would be to state that there is some unknown natural phenomenon to explain this apparent "fine tuning"." Please explain to me how some "unknown" natural phenomenon is scientific. Please explain this unknown or how something unknown is scientific.

How is an unknown natural phenomenon scientific? Isn't that believing in something unknown? Read your links before you link them!

mod edit - unnecessary quoting removed.

Please do not excessively quote. Use only what you need. Thanks.~Screwtape

« Last Edit: October 29, 2011, 12:20:27 AM by screwtape »

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Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

Also in that link, Stephen Hawking's says: This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary". [Stephen W. Hawking, Der Spiegel, 1989]

"One does not have to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through the laws of physics". [Stephen Hawking, Black Holes & Baby Universes]

In my earlier posts I talk about Hawking's admitting that you cannot prove scientifically there is no God using quotes from his book A Brief History of Space and Time. Here again he admits the limitations of historical science as compared to observational science.

In response to his admission that God would have to "act through the laws of physics." God created the laws of physics.

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Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

jt - what is it with you and this idea that God cannot be disproved? Do you have any idea what a dumb idea it is to support a belief by claiming it cannot be disproven? Think about it...for more than a few seconds. What you are saying, is that as long as something cannot be disproven, then it is either true, or could be true (in your case, you're saying it is absolutely true).

Listen, some ancient human, or possibly a group of them, started this "god is real" mess, not the other way around. Do you understand what that means? It means that the original assertion came from someone who said there is a god. It did NOT come from a non-believer. But you can bet your deluded ass that the non-believers questioned it, probably right away.

First god asserting human: "Look, those loud cracks of blinding light, starting a fire in that forest! There must be a god!"First skeptic: "WTF is a god?"

And from there, the argument has gone on for millennia, with seemingly no end to the dumb-ass assertions that some god, or gods are out there, somewhere, doing stuff. While the non-believers are all standing around wondering what all the fuss is about. No freaking evidence! It's unbelievably stupid, actually. Especially the very weak and pathetic god of the Bible, with all of his demented morals and laws...

You're much better off asserting a "higher power" without any known attributes! But don't take cues from a goddamned atheist!

Anyway, the burden to prove that any god is real rests squarely and solely upon those who say it is real. There is no fucking reason for any non believer to have to prove that a god is not real. Shit.

In response to his admission that God would have to "act through the laws of physics." God created the laws of physics.

Base assertion. Can you provide evidence that god created the laws of physics? It's equally likely that the laws existed prior to god and he used them to create everything, assuming he even created anything in the first place. Assuming he even exists in the first place.

You have to do more than just pull things from your ass, you realize?

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"I drank what?!"- Socrates

"Dying for something when you know you'll be resurrected is not a sacrifice.It's a parlour trick."- an aquaintance

Philip of Macedon: (via messenger) If we enter Sparta, we will raze all your buildings and ravage all your women.Spartan Reply: If.

In response to his admission that God would have to "act through the laws of physics." God created the laws of physics.

Base assertion. Can you provide evidence that god created the laws of physics? It's equally likely that the laws existed prior to god and he used them to create everything, assuming he even created anything in the first place. Assuming he even exists in the first place.

You have to do more than just pull things from your ass, you realize?

]....it is unfair to expect jtp56 to do more than that of which he is actually capable...

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"...but on a lighter note, demons were driven from a pig today in Gloucester." Bill Bailey

In response to his admission that God would have to "act through the laws of physics." God created the laws of physics.

Base assertion. Can you provide evidence that god created the laws of physics? It's equally likely that the laws existed prior to god and he used them to create everything, assuming he even created anything in the first place. Assuming he even exists in the first place.

You have to do more than just pull things from your ass, you realize?

]....it is unfair to expect jtp56 to do more than that of which he is actually capable...

I prefer to think of it as encouraging him to stretch himself a little.

« Last Edit: October 28, 2011, 08:04:24 PM by Alzael »

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"I drank what?!"- Socrates

"Dying for something when you know you'll be resurrected is not a sacrifice.It's a parlour trick."- an aquaintance

Philip of Macedon: (via messenger) If we enter Sparta, we will raze all your buildings and ravage all your women.Spartan Reply: If.

jtp56: Neither logical syllogisms nor earnest belief can substitute for actual evidence. And you have no evidence to prove that "God did it", just as Hawking has no evidence to prove that God doesn't exist. But the fact is that he doesn't have to disprove God's existence (if there is no evidence to show something might exist, what is the point of trying to prove that it doesn't?), you have to prove it. That's impossible without actual evidence.

You can say that your belief is true from now until the Sun grows cold, and it won't generate one single speck of evidence in its favor.

You can argue that nobody can disprove your belief until the last human being has disappeared into the ashes of history, and it won't do one single thing towards actually proving that there is anything to your belief in the first place.

That is why religion falters, because there is no way to objectively show that there's something there to begin with.

In response to his admission that God would have to "act through the laws of physics." God created the laws of physics.

Base assertion. Can you provide evidence that god created the laws of physics? It's equally likely that the laws existed prior to god and he used them to create everything, assuming he even created anything in the first place. Assuming he even exists in the first place.

You have to do more than just pull things from your ass, you realize?

]....it is unfair to expect jtp56 to do more than that of which he is actually capable...

I prefer to think of it as encouraging him to stretch himself a little.

be careful of what you wish for mate. jtp56 is already a world class puller

stretcher of the truthstretcher of beliefstretcher case

ST. Recher the Bile (short for bible).

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"...but on a lighter note, demons were driven from a pig today in Gloucester." Bill Bailey

No problem at all. The first law of thermodynamics began to be in place at the Big Bang. Beside this, how do you want to sustain your wish of no beginning in face of the second law ?

I think you don't understand just how severe a problem it really is. It isn't a matter of when the laws of thermodynamics came into play, it's a matter of why they came into play at all. And if the first law was in place at the Big Bang, then the others had to have been at well.

That means this speculative god put entropy into place. Entropy is what causes things to die - death in living things is the state in which entropic disorder makes life impossible. So that means this god set things up so that anything that lived in the universe would eventually die. Not some mythical Fall, not human choice. It was set up that way from the beginning, by this god. Who then blamed humans for the fact of their own deaths, even though those deaths were unavoidable due to the rules of the universe.

And since you apparently did not notice even though I said it in the post you quoted, I'm speculating. That means that I don't actually think it happened this way, but I'm considering it purely as a hypothetical thought exercise. So it doesn't contradict anything I said earlier, and I am not suddenly agreeing with your beliefs of a creator.

That doesn't even make sense. First off, the universe is 'eternal' only in the sense that there'll be space and uniformly-distributed heat an unfathomable number of years down the line, when entropy reaches its maximum value. I somehow don't think that's what you have in mind when you envision eternity. Second, his goal was not to create the universe as it now exists? That means he screwed it up from the very start.

i won't go into detail by myself to answer you, but if you want to know the standpoint i adhere in regard of this issue, you can read this website :

jtp56: Neither logical syllogisms nor earnest belief can substitute for actual evidence. And you have no evidence to prove that "God did it", just as Hawking has no evidence to prove that God doesn't exist. But the fact is that he doesn't have to disprove God's existence (if there is no evidence to show something might exist, what is the point of trying to prove that it doesn't?), you have to prove it.

We do not have to prove anything. If we come up with a better explanation, than atheists have, than we have a advantage. Thats all we pretend. To say theists do not have any evidece for Gods existence is plain wrong. What differs us theists from atheists is just how we do interprete scientific evidence. All the matter is the interpretation. And we have indeed many reasons to deduce God. While a common answer of atheists, when it comes to the hard questions, is the cheap " we don't know " escape. I am asking myself, what then science, philosophy, and religion serves for....... in reality this is just a escape for who does not want to aknowledge that the evidence points rationally and logically to God.

What differs us theists from atheists is just how we do interprete scientific evidence. All the matter is the interpretation.

You mean the scientific evidence that not only points towards the possibility that the universe was not created by anything but actually supports that position? Or the evidence that shows the Bible is wrong?

And we have indeed many reasons to deduce God. While a common answer of atheists, when it comes to the hard questions, is the cheap " we don't know " escape. I am asking myself, what then science, philosophy, and religion serves for....... in reality this is just a escape for who does not want to aknowledge that the evidence points rationally and logically to God.

Of course. Why be humble and admit you don't actually know when you can pull "interpretations" out of your ass?

That website you linked to? Utter shit. I have to be honest, I mean just look at what the guy says:

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At the onset, let me say that although I do emphatically maintain that God created everything, I adamantly do not believe that this Creation came into existence in a period of six 24-hour days (the "young-earth" view of Creation). For more details, see yôm = "day", long "days", evening and morning, the seventh "day", and ordinals.

A claim made by "young-earth" creationists is that no death and decay, of any kind, existed prior to Eve and Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:6). They insist, therefore, that human disobedience and rebelliousness toward God ruined all of God's "perfect" Creation.

Romans 5:12

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.... (Romans 5:12)This verse speaks of Adam's original sin and how, through that sin, sin entered the world of mankind. As a result, all men have sinned. Because the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23a), and because all men have sinned, then death is the penalty mankind must pay, due to sin. In no way does this imply that death came to the animal or plant kingdoms because of sin.The wages of each person's sin is the death of that person. Animals and plants cannot sin; they are incapable of disobedience and rebellion against God, and God does not hold them personally responsible for their actions. Animals and plants lived and died on the earth to help prepare the earth for the bringing of mankind (beginning with Adam and Eve) into the world on the sixth "day" of creation.

And let's compare this supposed stance that's already weak with just Bible verses to back it up of yours to the post directed towards you:

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I think you don't understand just how severe a problem it really is. It isn't a matter of when the laws of thermodynamics came into play, it's a matter of why they came into play at all. And if the first law was in place at the Big Bang, then the others had to have been at well.

That means this speculative god put entropy into place. Entropy is what causes things to die - death in living things is the state in which entropic disorder makes life impossible. So that means this god set things up so that anything that lived in the universe would eventually die. Not some mythical Fall, not human choice. It was set up that way from the beginning, by this god. Who then blamed humans for the fact of their own deaths, even though those deaths were unavoidable due to the rules of the universe.

And since you apparently did not notice even though I said it in the post you quoted, I'm speculating. That means that I don't actually think it happened this way, but I'm considering it purely as a hypothetical thought exercise. So it doesn't contradict anything I said earlier, and I am not suddenly agreeing with your beliefs of a creator.

That doesn't even make sense. First off, the universe is 'eternal' only in the sense that there'll be space and uniformly-distributed heat an unfathomable number of years down the line, when entropy reaches its maximum value. I somehow don't think that's what you have in mind when you envision eternity. Second, his goal was not to create the universe as it now exists? That means he screwed it up from the very start.

Beautifully well done dodge. I am genuinely impressed.

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Of all of God's creatures, Adam and Eve were the only ones who had the opportunity to escape death. They alone were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26a,27a) and were given the capacity to live forever, had they chosen not to sin.

Right..and, which all-knowing and all-powerful God made these supposedly first humans in the first place knowing full well that they were going to sin? Oh that's right, your God.

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We do not have to prove anything. If we come up with a better explanation, than atheists have, than we have a advantage. Thats all we pretend.

Atheists aren't saying that there's a sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic and slavery-approving God up there that loves each and every one of us (except the women..and slaves oh and non-Christians..and people who work on the Sabbath along with homosexuals), YOU are. The onus is on YOU to prove that THERE IS a God. We don't have to do shit. You're making the claim, not us. Get it straight.

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To say theists do not have any evidece for Gods existence is plain wrong.

Which theists and which god? And if you're saying Christians and their God, then yes they don't have evidence for its existence. Which is fortunate really.

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What differs us theists from atheists is just how we do interprete scientific evidence. All the matter is the interpretation.

Oh! OH! Well excuse me! I never thought gathering evidence to answer complicated questions and making millions of peoples' lives comfortable by advancing in the general field of science weren't important. All it matters is how all that shit is interpreted! Of course! How could I have been so blind?

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And we have indeed many reasons to deduce God. While a common answer, when it comes to the hard questions, is the cheap " we don't know " escape.

Lol..that's rich. It's much better than claiming a specific diety with extraordinary stupidity magically waved its tentacles or hands or whatever and life sprung into existence!

I mean really, all of YOUR answers are either "because the Bible says so" or "God did it". Rational people? They actually think.

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I am asking myself, what then science, philosophy, and religion serves for.......

Respectively, a much better quality of life while solving problems and questions in this universe, intellectually discussing it and to laugh at one day. The really useful religions are not of the Abrahamic stock really.

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in reality this is just a escape for who does not want to aknowledge that the evidence points rationally and logically to God.

In reality, you are now just desperately preaching because you have no evidence at all of your god.

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But a absolute nothing can ? please explain .......

Let's throw out the Theory of Evolution, the Big Bang Theory or whatever else you deem to be completely wrong simply because they make the concept of your god laughable and obsolete.

Now, in what way, is your god even remotely plausible? Really. Without using the Bible to prove what's in the Bible and actually using evidence, does your god exist?

C, I have to disagree, it's not a dodge, it's a weasel. The way I see it, I went to a fair amount of time and trouble to write that post, and he dismissed it with one sentence and a link that he claims will answer me in detail. Couldn't have taken him more than a couple minutes, tops. I can't stop him from weaseling out of answering like that, but he knows that he doesn't have the chance of a snowball not melting in a furnace to convince me with that sort of thing.

But good comparison nonetheless. Did you notice that the site he linked to was using special pleading? Basically, despite the fact that everything that lives dies, humans are the only ones who brought death upon themselves. All other forms of death in the entire universe are part of "God's plan" for things, intended solely for the benefit of humans. It's only the deaths of humans that aren't part of God's plan, but resulted from human actions. Every instance of death everywhere else in the mind-bogglingly vast universe was intended to be there, just not human death. Riiight. All I'm gonna say is that it's a good thing that ego doesn't exert a gravitational force.

To say theists do not have any evidece for Gods existence is plain wrong. What differs us theists from atheists is just how we do interprete scientific evidence. All the matter is the interpretation.

Okay, so you're taking real scientific evidence, adding this indefinable element to it that you can't prove to anyone[1], and declaring that you have the right of it. Sorry, Occam's razor slices that to ribbons.

And we have indeed many reasons to deduce God. While a common answer of atheists, when it comes to the hard questions, is the cheap " we don't know " escape. I am asking myself, what then science, philosophy, and religion serves for....... in reality this is just a escape for who does not want to aknowledge that the evidence points rationally and logically to God.

You've said all this before, and it was countered before. And your only 'answer' is to keep saying it, as if you can get people to accept it through force of repetition. You know, people caricature this sort of dogged persistence of doing the same thing over and over again with things like the Black Knight from that Monty Python show. What really turns it into bad theater is your continued insistence that you have the right of it despite the fact that you have failed to convince a single person here that you do have it right, and that your retort has essentially become "Stop trying to cheese out of it by saying you don't know!"

I'll conclude by asking you to specifically state the "reasons to deduce God". Don't assume that anyone here knows them, don't try to direct us to other sites. Just put the ones you can personally think of in your own words, as simply and straightforwardly as you can. And then we can go from there.

Atheists aren't saying that there's a sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic and slavery-approving God up there that loves each and every one of us (except the women..and slaves oh and non-Christians..and people who work on the Sabbath along with homosexuals), YOU are. The onus is on YOU to prove that THERE IS a God. We don't have to do shit. You're making the claim, not us. Get it straight.

Present a highly probable scenario, where the universe came to be without a intellingent creator behind. Strong atheist indeed do make a claim, namely that most probably God does not exist. Why do you believe the scientific evidence points toward a natural origin , of a self caused, or eternally existing universe in one form or the other ?

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Which is fortunate really.

Why do you think it would be fortunate, if no God would exist ? If God does not exist, i can rape and kill a child, and say, that is perfectly right. And nobody can question my position, since no objective moral values exist. If God does not exist, the worst criminal might never be charged for his crimes, when he dies. That is not just. Its not right. Its not right that Hitler does not have to pay for what he did. I don't see any attractiveness of a scenario without a just God.

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What differs us theists from atheists is just how we do interprete scientific evidence. All the matter is the interpretation.

Oh! OH! Well excuse me! I never thought gathering evidence to answer complicated questions and making millions of peoples' lives comfortable by advancing in the general field of science weren't important. All it matters is how all that shit is interpreted! Of course! How could I have been so blind?[/quote]

i am writing about historical science, not operational science.

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And we have indeed many reasons to deduce God. While a common answer, when it comes to the hard questions, is the cheap " we don't know " escape.

Lol..that's rich. It's much better than claiming a specific diety with extraordinary stupidity magically waved its tentacles or hands or whatever and life sprung into existence!

I don't think its a position that can be justified, in front of all scientific, philosophic, and religious evidence we have on hand.

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I mean really, all of YOUR answers are either "because the Bible says so" or "God did it". Rational people? They actually think.

No, i say , because the universe had a beginning, is finely tuned to life, because the complex and specified information contained in the cell, because of sex, conscience, irreducible complexity, and existing morals, beside religious experiences, we can rationally deduce God as the best explanation for all these phenomenas, while naturalism has completely failed to deliver eloquent and highly compelling answers to all that. Its no wonder why atheists do not mention naturalism. Its worthless. What is left ? Nothing really.

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But a absolute nothing can ? please explain .......

Let's throw out the Theory of Evolution, the Big Bang Theory or whatever else you deem to be completely wrong simply because they make the concept of your god laughable and obsolete.

The Big Band theory does lead actually directly to God.... But you must be bad informed..it seems....

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Now, in what way, is your god even remotely plausible? Really.

How is it naturalism ? REally..... what do you have actually on hand ? your answer of the Big Bang, and ET, is very superficial......